Very interesting indeed. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole story is loosely adapted from the realities of SES, given names have been changed and yet so much is so similar.

Some choice quotations:

"I didn’t know it then, but they had sought professional help on how to deal with me and my situation, and had been told that challenging me could be the worst thing they could do. So they decided to sit it out and hope I’d one day see the light.

“This group wasn’t about money but power,” explains Graham Baldwin. “Nick was very confused when I met him, like many people in his position who are trying to make sense of what happened to them. I let him talk a lot, but I asked a lot of questions, such as 'why do you think they did this or that?’. Cult victims must find the answers themselves. Cults target intelligent young people who are often searching for something. Anyone can be recruited. There is no immunity.”

Nick eventually became close to Danny, another member who was becoming disillusioned with the community, “and talking to him, my mind started opening up. I started questioning things I had been told. For instance, the leader had said that he’d had an accident as a child and had been pronounced clinically dead, that he was a soul from another planet – rubbish, of course, but by the time we were told this we were so far gone, we believed it. Recruitment is a slow, steady process, you kind of slip into it, and before you know it 'facts’ such as these are plausible. What you don’t know early on is that everyone else is in on it, so you are being recruited by the entire group. I remember an American girl arriving and we all recruited her, me included. I’d become one of them.”